Learning to Struggle,Learning to Govern: How Black Youth Marshaled Education to Navigate Urban Transformations in the Motor City,1967-1972

Abstract

This article examines the role of nontraditional education in Black youth’s efforts to navigate postwar transformations in Detroit, Michigan. While historians have debated the role of social movements in contestations over urban space, there is still a great deal to learn about the place of education and the young people who would inherit the city in these movements. Marshaling the analytical frameworks of social history and intellectual history, this article demonstrates that the use of education as a tool for political struggle was a practice that crossed institutional boundaries, from community-led political education to university partnerships to school-sponsored seminars. The nature of cities, with their expansive bureaucracies and vibrant political life, required and made possible educational projects that traversed institutional contexts. Within the city landscape, high school and out-of-school youth, academics, and labor radicals collectively reimagined the function of education in transforming urban spaces.

The spring of 1969 was a vibrant time politically for Black youth who wanted to reshape Detroit’s municipal politics. The Motor City was abuzz with Black liberal and radical activists who sought to marshal the energy of militant youth that had been growing for more than three years. To capture the growing youth movement, activists across the political spectrum organized citywide conferences. In May, the Detroit Public Schools, along with local universities, clergymen, and business leaders planned the citywide Senior Government Day for high school youth who wanted a voice in community politics, sponsoring breakout sessions on juvenile delinquency, welfare and community development, and education. Several adult consultants attended the conference, including members of the Black press and city council. ¹ One month earlier, the Metropolitan Detroit Youth Foundation (MDYF) hosted a citywide youth conference for more than 300 youth participants from several organizations including the Sons of Malcolm, Black Students of Cooley, and the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization. Participants proposed youth councils for each political district, a citywide student union, and a leadership training institute. ² If Senior Government Day represented the liberal wing of the Civil Rights movement’s efforts to grasp the minds and energy of youth, the MDYF’s conference represented an important shift toward Black Power in the local movement. Although Senior Government Day relied on adult consultants to teach students about contemporary social issues, the MDYF treated youth participants as collaborators who endeavored to seek solutions collectively. The Black Student Voice’s proposed National Black Youth Conference expanded this practice of democratizing youth-based civic engagement by organizing Black youth independently of adults. Furthermore, it called for a national Black youth movement that could play a significant role in community struggles. ³ These conferences aimed to teach young people the inner workings of local and state governance while urging them to view themselves as agents of community change. Although African Americans had a long history of educating Black communities for Black self-determination beyond the classroom, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed an expansion of this practice and the role of Black students as its practitioners.

These conferences suggest that across the political spectrum, students and community leaders turned to education as a way to navigate postwar urban transformations and demands for political power. Urbanization created bureaucracies and redevelopment projects that disrupted intimate community ties and pushed ordinary people to the periphery of municipal institutions as racist ideologies about high-density spaces and overcrowded conditions, and the Black youth who lived in them, limited access to the same resources and dreams that brought their migrant parents and grandparents to this city of promise. Detroit, by the 1960s, was surrounded by auto factories and highways that cut through its core and produced dangerous traffic conditions for children at play, leading to accidents that propelled Black youth and mothers to organize for safer streets. ⁴ Detroit’s youth also experienced unsafe conditions within schools where hostility from the surrounding white neighborhoods and teachers marked the city as a contentious site of racial and class conflict. On the streets and in their schools, Black teenagers encountered police brutality and surveillance while enduring high unemployment rates produced by deindustrialization and white flight. ⁵ Recreational opportunities that could serve as respite from the conditions were often limited depending on the section of the city in which Black youth resided. ⁶ These conditions were not simply the backdrop of their lives; they became a source of information about how to organize amid ever-expanding demographics and growing bureaucracies.

Although histories of Detroit, urban education, and Black Power have captured the importance of schools and education as sites of political struggle, the literature has not fully explained the extent to which Black youth marshaled education to navigate the urban conditions that shaped their lives. ⁷ While historians of urban education have explored the role of schools in struggles over the city, highlighting battles over resources such as personnel, school funding, and the curriculum, these histories largely address contests within the schoolhouse. ⁸ But as Ansley Erickson argues, “the density of urban space, as well as the institutions that such density entails, make cities ripe locales for an investigation of learning beyond schooling.” ⁹ There is a great deal to learn from examining this historical moment both within and beyond the schoolyard. As the city and its institutions expanded, so too did Black youth’s access to civic education beyond the classroom. For example, as the Black electorate in Detroit increased, the possibilities for electing Black political officials and the need for a voting base that understood the inner workings of government expanded with it. Political education, in its various forms, could produce a sharper understanding of the structures of power among the electorate.

Black Power Studies has also amplified the significance of education, from political study for youth organizing and leadership development to education for Black nation building in social movements. ¹⁰ Although it has sharpened scholarly conceptions of education for liberation, more work remains if we are to understand the movement’s analysis of the city as a site of education. According to historian Russell Rickford, “If education was a crucial realm of struggle, the African American metropolis was the new land. Young militants regarded the black city core as an oppressed political territory and as a key sight for reimaging community.” ¹¹ Similarly, viewing cities as “The Black Man’s Land,” education theorists of the Detroit-based All-African Peoples Union (AAPU) argued that education should specifically prepare Black people to govern in cities which were often populated largely by Black communities, as well as in sections of cities where Black residents represented the majority. ¹² Although urban policymakers and education reformers often viewed Black youth as future delinquents and dependents, Black teenagers who came of age in the 1960s determined that education could and should help them make sense of the changes that were taking place in their communities. Because their coming-of-age experiences were vastly different from that of their parents and grandparents who were raised in the South and migrated to the city as adults, teens of the 1960s had to find new tools and strategies that could aid their ability to navigate postwar Detroit. Ultimately, education could serve as a pathway to collective liberation and as an engine for Black youth who wanted to determine the kind of lives they could lead in urban spaces.

This article offers two arguments. First, it argues that Black youth marshaled political education and community-based research to navigate significant urban transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. Second, it maintains that the borders between the various educational projects were quite porous, with radical students seeking to institutionalize revolutionary ideals within the formal structures of educational institutions, often returning these projects to movement spaces when the institutions rejected them. It demonstrates that the use of education as a tool for political struggle was a practice that crossed institutional boundaries, from community-led political education to university partnerships to school-sponsored seminars. The nature of cities, with their expansive bureaucracies and vibrant political life, required and made possible educational projects that traversed institutional contexts. Within the city landscape, high school and out-of-school youth, academics, and labor radicals collectively reimagined the function of education in the transformation of urban spaces.

This article examines three educational projects that took shape inside and outside of Detroit’s schools during the 1960s and 1970s to understand the prominent role of education across institutional contexts in efforts to shape the city’s future: the East Side Voice of Independent Detroit (ESVID)’s Political Education Project (PEP), the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), and the Cooley High School Political Education Seminar. While DGEI and ESVID’s projects formed beyond traditional school walls, the Cooley seminar firmly entrenched itself there. It suggests that historians must think critically about education beyond the traditional classroom as a vital resource for Black Power youth who wanted to discern how to best navigate urban spaces. Whereas historical scholarship tends to simply focus on the dissemination of information within the movement, this article addresses how Black youth actively used new knowledge to transform their worlds. It reveals that education was critical to the question posed by historian Heather Ann Thompson, “Whose Detroit?” ¹³ Specifically, that education was instrumental to young people’s contests for power in the city. Together, these historiographies reveal that Black teenagers were indeed Black Power interlocutors who treated the city as more than a problem to be managed. In their work, it provided the resources needed to achieve Black self-determination.

These young activists were building on the tradition of African Americans who crafted visions of civic education in citizenship schools in the South, and the freedom schools and liberation schools that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party formed to help Black youth develop their own capacities to drive social change as well as an analysis of power. ¹⁴ But this era witnessed the development of dozens of political education and civic education projects outside of the classroom that usually blended some aspect of citizenship education (education about the rights and responsibilities of citizens and how the government functions), political education (examines political and economic theories to provide an analysis of the structures of power), and culturally relevant education (teaching of Black history and literature as well as Black self-pride and nation building). ¹⁵ For example, parents and community activists viewed education as the means to producing in Black children an “African personality.” The development of an African personality, they argued, was especially critical to the success of Black Nationalism. ¹⁶ Students themselves called for a culturally and politically relevant curriculum that could facilitate their own self-discovery and teach them how to change the structures that shaped their lives. ¹⁷ Each of these forms of education revealed how civic institutions worked, but politically and culturally relevant education tended to center a critical analysis of those structures as structures of power more frequently.

Black teenagers who came of age in Detroit during the 1960s and 1970s also inherited a vibrant radical intellectual tradition as well as a long history of struggles for Black education. Between the Friday Night Militant Labor Forums that were held at Debs Halls and sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party and the Forums (1965-1967) organized at the Black bookstore that Edward Vaughn owned, emerging Black leftists and nationalists found a rich intellectual community committed to political study and debate. The semiweekly meetings held at Vaughn’s bookstore introduced young Black radicals to Black Nationalist and Marxist theorists while discussions at Debs Hall addressed topics such as armed self-defense, Robert F. Williams, and the Civil Rights movement. ¹⁸ The movement for Black education was just as dynamic. In 1966, students at the predominantly Black Northern High School organized a boycott to call for quality education. This boycott garnered the support of more than 2,000 students and led to the formation of the Northern High Freedom School. ¹⁹ By 1968, teachers had created the supplementary curriculum The Struggle for Freedom and Rights while local teachers’ conferences featured prominent African American historians like Benjamin Quarles. ²⁰ Furthermore, this movement compelled members of the Detroit Board of Education to rename Eastern High School after Martin Luther King, Jr. just a few months after the civil rights leader’s assassination. These successes were the consequence of a dynamic movement for school desegregation and Black community control of schools that Black youth either inherited or helped to make possible. ²¹ The educational projects that appear in this article built on and extended the city’s own tradition of political education and educational activism while contributing to the larger history of Black education for citizenship and liberation.

Tomorrow’s Citizens: ESVID’s PEP

Americans in the 1960s produced a crucible of social change that enlarged the possibilities for the political engagement of Black teenagers. This decade witnessed the War on Poverty which urged municipal governments to include ordinary people in the political process, the Civil Rights movement’s commitment to participatory democracy, and the Black Power movement’s demands for power and community control. This democratization of U.S. politics was not only significant for racial minorities and women, but also for those who had yet to reach eighteen years old. Educational projects aimed at those who were “too young to vote” provided Black youth with analytical frameworks and practical methods for engaging with local government while helping them to comprehend and respond to the transformations around them. To prepare Black youth for a new civic future, municipal governments and community organizations created youth civic projects, including youth city councils and junior governments. Although these programs were sometimes designed as antidelinquency measures, Black youth and their communities used these resources to develop political tools needed to transform their communities. The East Side Voice of Independent Detroit’s PEP demonstrates how such projects used education to help Black youth traverse the ever-shifting urban landscape.

Several months after the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, Frank Ditto escorted a small group of Detroit’s Black teenagers to Gary, Indiana to visit the city’s first African American mayor, Richard H. Hatcher. The activist had recently arrived from the south side of Chicago, less than an hour away from Gary. ²² This trip, taken nearly five years before the election of Detroit’s own first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young, aimed “to give these youths an introduction to politics [. . .].” The excursion was a part of ESVID’s Political Education Project (PEP) which sought to prepare students to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. According to Hatcher’s assistant, Claude Mayberry, Jr., “Our Black youth of today are tomorrow’s citizens. The way the present public school system is set up they never get a thorough understanding of their government. They may learn how to pull a lever, but they never learn why.” ²³ Mayberry had highlighted a critical dilemma. While adults preached the virtues of voting, there seemed to be little discussion in educational institutions of how the vote could be wielded as a form of political power. But for Black youth who had experienced the 1967 rebellion and the presence of National Guard tanks, studying the inner workings of the institutions that had ignited urban unrest had become critical.

Ditto arrived on the east side at the request of the Churches of East Side for Social Action who were primarily concerned about police–community relations. While tensions between the Adult Community Movement for Education, the Afro-American Unity Movement, the Afro-American Youth Movement, and the police placed the city on edge between 1964 and 1966, the Kercheval Incident of 1966 brought these tensions to a head. On August 9th, “a Big Four cruiser, manned by an all-white crew,” stopped seven Black men who they had determined were loitering. One of the men resisted the officers’ efforts to place him in the squad car and called for others to come to his aid. Others standing nearby began to throw objects at the police. By the end of the “mini-riot,” more than 150 officers had arrived to manage the crowd of 100. The incident occurred in the oldest part of the city, and in the census tract that the press had characterized as the “poorest of the poor.” ²⁴ Ditto may have arrived months before the rebellion, but local leaders had concerns about violence on the east side early on.

Within months of his arrival, Ditto had organized ESVID, along with its PEP and junior government. ²⁵ The PEP wanted to introduce students to electoral politics as a means to achieving Black self-determination. Through the PEP, high school-aged youth elected peers to junior municipal positions on the basis of substantive ideas. ESVID members elected a junior mayor and junior municipal administration, superintendent, and junior Board of Education. The program was aimed at

(1) increasing their awareness of the channels of opportunity within the local, state and federal levels of government; (2) motivating them to thoroughly learn the workings of these institutions in order to improve communication between the community and the establishment; (3) teaching them that politics can be an orderly vehicle for social change.

Furthermore, he aimed to provide Black youth “with the expertise they will require as potential future leaders of their community.” ²⁶ According to Ditto, the program could teach Black youth “the true meaning and purpose of Black Power by teaching them that politics and not Molotov cocktails can be an orderly vehicle for social change.” Instead of turning to violence, he wanted Black youth to see that it was “only through the strategic and knowledgeable use of political power that a system heretofore inadequate and unfair in its treatment of Black citizens can be changed.” ²⁷ Mayberry, Hatcher’s assistant, believed that through this project

a generation of Black Americans can be educated in the art and craft of politics and can be trained to pursue it with dedication, integrity and concern for the progress and future of our civilization. Such a program will be an important contribution to educating this electorate in whose hand now rests the destiny of this city, state and nation. ²⁸

Ditto proposed the recruitment of twenty Black youth from the east side to form the junior government. These core twenty were then charged to organize a broad coalition of Black youth outside of school as well as those who attended Kettering, East Catholic, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Southeastern High Schools, which were all located on the east side. ²⁹ Student leaders in ESVID registered 4,000 teenagers to vote in their citywide youth election. While the rate of voting for adults in city elections hovered over 30 percent, 92 percent of the registered teenagers voted in the junior government election of August 1968. ³⁰

ESVID sought out young people who adults considered the hard-core troublemakers. Ditto explains, “We went to those who were alienated from everything—school, church and everything else, because everybody wants to deal with the goody-goody type person.” Many of the young people who Ditto recruited had been searching for work that could give them a sense of dignity and an alternative to gangs. In interviews for ESVID’s newsletter, The Ghetto Speaks, Black youth revealed these desires:

You know the average young person out here don’t have a job, man. They don’t have anything to do. [. . .] You go down to the employment agency and you can’t get a job. [. . .] I’m ready to do anything anyone else is ready to do—because I want to live. I want to live. No one wants to die. I want to live. ³¹

Ditto also sought out the “hard-core poor” who were often excluded from community action programs because he believed that people who already had access to power found more power in these programs while the “hard-core poor” did not know how “to deal with experienced public officials, business leaders, and project directors and, therefore, do not have any real power.” ³²

PEP participants gained insight into the structures of municipal power by observing political leaders and through the development of their own parallel civic body. They established platforms for the mock Liberation Party and Revolutionary Party, and elected members for each. This process aimed to teach Black youth how to collectively solve problems while “learning the art of cooperation and team work.” Members also attended workshops that examined the “art of city government,” as well as how to “select [. . .] candidates; determine [. . .] campaign platforms; select [. . .] materials and all other important aspects of running a political campaign.” Elected leaders constituted the junior government or city hall that would be responsible for meeting the promises made during the campaign. ³³

There was a great deal of support for the project when the junior government was inaugurated in July 1968. The newly formed New Detroit, Inc., a coalition of business and civic leaders formed in response to the rebellion, supported the PEP with a $50,000 grant. ³⁴ The election ceremony was held in the chambers of the Detroit Common Council and Julian Bond, a former member of SNCC and recently elected member of the Georgia House of Representatives, delivered the keynote address for its inaugural ball. Junior government leaders had been elected by thousands of their peers to serve a two-year term during a three-week campaign in the public schools. According to the junior mayor, his board would “investigate conditions at their respective schools and report back to him.” The board would “then seek dialogue with school officials in an effort to find solutions to existing problems.” ³⁵ Ditto’s proposal for the PEP suggests that the junior government could address a wide range of urban problems, but in practice, many of the youth focused their efforts on pressing for a school holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as its first campaign.

A few days after the Political Education Program sponsored its first Saturday Seminar, the civil rights activist and preacher Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Young people across the country staged walkouts to protest his murder, and the junior government launched its first campaign in fall 1968. Since many of its members were high school students, they chose an issue that shaped the daily context of their lives, the high school curriculum. As the city’s Black population grew, so did its political power, which the students used to reimagine public schooling. This campaign placed students in conversation with this growing power base through its demands for a curriculum that spoke to the history and needs of a majority Black city.

The junior government leaders, including junior Mayor Jimmie Walker and junior Council members Delthea Kinney and James Holt, took their concerns to the Detroit Board of Education. According to the students, if the schools could honor historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, then they could also recognize Black figures in a city with a growing Black population. The junior government also urged school leaders to establish school holidays that commemorated Malcolm X on February 21st, the day of his assassination and Rosa Parks on December 1st to observe the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The teenagers fought for the recognition of these three figures because of the lack of Black representation in their history textbooks. One student leader stated, “We hear what the white man wants us to. We study the white man’s books and what he taught us is irrelevant to blacks.” The junior government considered Parks ‘“an authentic black heroine’” who “galvanized the world into a state of concern in her unprecedented action in resisting white oppression by refusing to obey the order of a white bus driver.’” When Parks learned of the students’ demands, she stated, “It’s interesting to note [. . .] that these young people are so interested and aware of today’s political situations. I really can’t say just how I feel about it (Rosa Parks Day).” ³⁶ By then, she had been living in the city for nearly a decade, having made the move from Montgomery to Detroit after losing her job and facing death threats for her activism. ³⁷ She received a great deal of support from labor radicals and the Black political establishment, working for the newly elected Black congressman, John Conyers. ³⁸ Parks had an enduring presence in the city that later became an educational resource.

Ditto envisioned the junior government’s presentation to the board members as a form of political education and preparation for their civic engagement as adults. But the teenagers soon learned that there were limits to the board’s power. Board President Peter Grylls explained that only the Michigan State Legislature had the power to establish school holidays. The board had already agreed to rename Eastern High School after Martin Luther King, Jr. a month following his assassination after students, parents, and community members had petitioned them to do so. ³⁹ But the very act of engaging with elected officials was itself a form of political education, with each interaction clarifying the political process. Through their conversations with the board, the junior government learned that state officials, not local officials, possessed the power to approve their specific request. While it is unclear if the PEP took their demands to state officials, they later petitioned Detroit’s Common Council and business leaders to establish Martin Luther King Day, likely in an effort to push local representatives to make similar demands of state officials. Ditto claimed that the students had some impact on Conyers who submitted a proposal for a national holiday later that year, even though they did not receive recognition for it. ⁴⁰ Despite uncertainties about the junior government’s role in expanding demands for the holiday, it is clear that the junior government used lessons from community-based civic education to call for a culturally relevant education and that in doing so, they aimed to shift the balance of power in discussions with adult leaders.

The students won some concessions. Superintendent Arthur Johnson proposed that the board honor King on his birthday instead of the day of his assassination as the students had initially requested. The board would honor Rosa Parks with a tribute to her “at the regular meeting of the Board nearest the Martin Luther King Day in January.” But as a result of student efforts, Parks delivered lectures at several high schools on the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. ⁴¹ The head of the district’s Social Studies department agreed to provide social studies teachers with materials on Malcolm X’s life on the anniversary of his assassination. While he did not want to organize a public event, he committed to providing opportunities for students to examine an “objective treatment to Malcolm X.” ⁴² While authoring textbooks and managing their distribution could take years, honorific holidays and days of observance placed the histories and cultures of Black communities into the lives of their peers in more immediate ways. ESVID’s PEP may have failed to institutionalize a school holiday, but they found creative ways to circumvent the intricacies of the city and state bureaucracies.

The program’s funding ended soon after, Ditto claims, because the federal government was only concerned about keeping young people off the streets during the summer months. In his view, the federal government funded programs “to make it a cool summer, but they’re saying the hell with them during the winter months.” Still, Ditto persisted because he saw an opportunity for Black youth “to become involved in correcting some of the situations that make people want to burn up things.” ⁴³ Ditto and the other adults may have provided the resources, but the students managed a citywide student election that marshaled the Black Power movement’s calls for self-determination and the long tradition of citizenship education in African American communities to gain some influence in the eyes of elected leaders. ESVID introduced students to political leaders who would have been responsible for a range of issues, but the students used the program to address their specific concerns around the curriculum, recognition of living and slain political activists, and later, community control of policing through their police patrols. The students used their access to Detroit’s Black political elite to reimagine the city. In the process, they put into practice the AAPU’s conception of the “City as the Black Man’s Land.”

Political leaders may have viewed programs like the PEP as an antidelinquency measure, but Ditto and the students used these projects to gain and wield political power while also preventing juvenile delinquency. ESVID capitalized on the Black Power movement’s influence in local and national politics as well as the participatory ethos of the 1960s. During this era, Black teenagers witnessed African Americans achieve access to elected positions at levels not seen since Reconstruction. They also heard the rumblings of legislators who debated lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen years old and imagined the real possibility that they could one day take over the reins of municipal government. While ESVID did not explicitly draw connections between their PEP and the movement to lower the voting age, their project prepared students to use the franchise as effectively as possible before Congress passed the twenty-sixth Amendment. ESVID’s project suggests that Black youth had to understand how city government operated before they could run for elected office.

While arguments for youth suffrage often relied on young people’s service in the armed forces, some proponents claimed that young people, especially those in urban communities, had proven their political maturity by navigating crowded conditions, hyper-policing, and environmental issues that generations before them had not. Such arguments emerged when Detroiters voted on Proposal B, the Minimum Voting Age Amendment in the 1970 state elections, which would have amended the state constitution to lower the voting age to eighteen. In support of this proposal, Black Minister Reverend Charles Adams of Hartford Baptist explained,

They have walked in the midst of the urban ruins that we have created holding on to God knows what. They have been poisoned by pollutions they did not create; they have been victims of social crimes they did not commit; they have been the exploited avenues of a dope traffic they did not start [. . .]. ⁴⁴

While ESVID did not name the youth suffrage movement as its inspiration for the PEP, the seeds it sowed in 1968 continued to grow in 1972 when, for the first time, eighteen-year-olds in Michigan could vote in local and federal elections. ⁴⁵

Community-Based Research and Education in Action: The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute

While ESVID’s junior government used civic education to gain influence in the city, their peers on the west side in the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI) explored community-based research and education to better understand and change conditions in their communities. These young people were among the many students on the west side who, between 1966 and 1968, decided to leave high school without graduating once school leaders failed to respond to their concerns about education in Detroit schools. Instead, they sought out jobs in the auto factories where they could gain seniority ahead of their peers who began factory work after graduation. Others sought employment elsewhere as well as alternatives to delinquency. ⁴⁶ Still, they maintained their commitment to community organizing against the growing presence of burlesque venues and liquor stores. Referring to themselves as The Infernos, this cohort of Black teenagers moved their organizing from the schools to the streets, and later transformed their work in both spheres of organizing through demands for a community-based research and educational project.

The white radical geographer William Bunge arrived precisely when The Infernos began to consider alternative paths to employment and recreation. When Bunge encountered the teenagers, he and his cohort of university-based geographers recognized the young people’s political organizing and sought their assistance for his “geographical expedition” which aimed to “map inequality.” The Infernos, whose membership included nearly 300 youth, agreed to assist Bunge with the Detroit Geographical Expedition for a while, but soon realized that they had entered into an unequal relationship with him. According to one of the youth leaders, sixteen-year-old Gwendolyn Warren, The Infernos did not care much about research for the sake of someone else’s dissertation or peer-reviewed journal article; they wanted jobs and research skills that could improve their lives and communities. Instead of driving graduate students around as they took notes for their expedition, sixteen-year-old Warren and her peers desired to address issues that were relevant to them, including the rise in car-related accidents that harmed children who lived near the newly constructed freeways. The Infernos agreed to continue their relationship with Bunge, but only if there was an educational component added to the expedition and the city helped to fundraise for a small business that employed the teenagers. Returning to high school was not the goal, since many of the young people felt that time on the streets had taught them well. They were fully prepared to begin academic training in the local universities. ⁴⁷ The geographers agreed to establish a community-based research program that prepared the teens to take college courses toward a degree. In the process, the youth pushed the Detroit Geographical Expedition to add an institute to its mission.

The teenagers, along with Bunge, formed the DGEI in 1969 where professors from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan agreed to “tithe their time” to teach in the Detroit community. DGEI students wanted to use the research conducted in these courses to understand “why lead poisoning was so bad” and to map traffic deaths. As Warren explains, “They bought their resources to the community to teach us the basic courses and discipline necessary to study the issues, to articulate the issues, and go to city hall and make change.” ⁴⁸ Detroit Public Schools may have prepared Black students for work in the auto factories, but DGEI provided them with the tools to understand their world beyond the factory gates. The Infernos pushed Bunge and DGEI to move beyond simply “discovering” inequality to training Black youth to combat it.

Any Black Detroiter, from auto workers to mothers, could enroll in DGEI’s extension courses at Wayne State University. Students who earned a C or better and forty-five hours of credit could transfer to any university in the State of Michigan. ⁴⁹ Professors from several disciplines provided courses in political science, statistics and probability, urban geography, algebra, and English composition. The University of Michigan initiated the program with its course, “Geographical aspects of urban planning.” Professors from Michigan State University introduced a range of additional courses, including “Cartography and Geographical Aspects of Urban Planning,” during the summer of 1969 which provided “the context in which were developed the skills and concepts which culminated in producing field notes II, ‘A Report to the Parents of Detroit on School Decentralization.’” ⁵⁰ In these courses, students learned how to “collect [. . .] data, draft [. . .] maps, and writ[e] a report.” ⁵¹ The youth researchers used these data to create a community control plan that they hoped could meet the needs of Black children, specifically. Their research revealed nearly 7,000 possible “regional combinations” and ranked these combinations by “sympathy,” which they defined as combinations that placed the greatest number of Black children in districts where Black voters were the majority. ⁵² The final assignment provided the data for the Black Plan, a community-based plan for community control of schools, which the 1970 Decentralization Conference had produced. If implemented, the Black Plan would have created eight school board regions of which six were to be controlled by a majority Black voting base. ⁵³

The report garnered significant attention and support from the Black press and local political leaders and activists. The Michigan Chronicle referred to it as “one of the most important proposals to come from an indigenous black group.” ⁵⁴ The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the West Central Organization, and State Senator Colemen A. Young fully championed it as the best possible approach to achieving community control of schools. ⁵⁵ The report provided local activists with concrete data that served as the basis for their organizing. Warren explained, for example, that Black Parents and Students for Community Control, an arm of the League, “took the report and broke it down into black language, made posters, made signs, set up community meetings and went out disseminating the information all over the community, which is exactly what we wanted.” She and others concluded that their research mattered beyond the production of books for promotion and academic recognition; it was significant to the people who could change the very institutions that shaped their city. As Warren stated in her report to the Annual Meeting of the American Geographers Association,

The most important point about the research is that people in the community are going to be involved in making the changes. Whatever research does come out can be related to the community since they are involved in doing it. We do not do silly research. ⁵⁶

In what was perhaps a critique of traditional academic research for career advancement and an audience of academics, Warren revealed the meaning and critical importance of education and research in communities seeking power. In a city with a growing bureaucratic infrastructure, community-based research provided some measure of power to those who did not have access to the traditional levers of political influence. While some viewed education and civic participation as an antidote to juvenile delinquency, it was equally important to expanding the role of ordinary people in urban struggles through what Warren, Cindi Katz, and Nik Heynen argued constituted a form of participatory action research (PAR). ⁵⁷

The research mattered to Black youth, despite the board of education’s decision to forgo implementing the Black Plan. ⁵⁸ At the age of sixteen, Warren and her peers advocated for PAR which centered community knowledge and participation in local policy-making. While she and the other youth researchers felt ambivalent about their collaboration with Bunge, who she later described as having problematic views about race and sexuality, the project created pathways to higher education for Black Detroiters. She and many others earned the required number of credits and transferred to Michigan State University in 1970, where a DGEI office was added to the campus that same year.

DGEI’s work demonstrates the role of education and research in one of the most significant urban processes of the era, the battle over the restructuring of urban school governance. Using their training in radical geography, Black youth identified a social issue that was important to them and conducted qualitative and quantitative research to provide possible solutions. In her speech to the American Association of Geographers, Warren explained, “Basically, what needs to be said is, we took your science and we are using your science in our everyday fight to survive in the City.” ⁵⁹ Through their research, DGEI revealed that the Cooley school region had a majority white voting base but a majority Black student population, which created concerns about who determined the futures of Black children. ⁶⁰ But as Warren shows, the young people’s research helped to shift the balance of some of this power, even if for a brief moment. As The Infernos moved their struggle for Detroit’s civic future into the city and onto the university campuses, other Black youth in northwest Detroit continued to push their schools to realize a vision of education that trained them to become agents of social change within the context of their daily lives.

From Citizens of Tomorrow to Citizens of Today: Institutionalizing Political Education in the Urban High School

On Friday September 1969, Black and white students at Cooley High School on the west side clashed during a Black-led student protest for the imprisoned Cleveland Black Nationalist activist, Fred “Ahmed” Evans. ⁶¹ White students and local residents met Black students with bottles, cans, bats, and chains. According to student and adult witnesses, three white men drove around recklessly in a pickup truck, yelling racist epithets at the students as they tried to escape safely back into the school building. In turn, a school administrator called the Detroit Police Department and officers rushed into the school to quell tensions, with the officers sprinting out of the school building with baseball bats. ⁶² On the other side of the fray, Black students encountered Donald Lobsinger’s Breakthrough, a local white nationalist hate group. The young Black activists found themselves at the center of school desegregation battles that blurred the line between school and community.

Some argued that the racial violence at Cooley High School was a consequence of the school board’s poorly planned desegregation policy it had implemented in 1967. The plan shifted Cooley’s student population from being predominantly white to one that was evenly divided along racial lines within two years, igniting years of interracial battles within the high school and others. ⁶³ Black students who attended Cooley encountered not just community violence, but the racist attitudes of teachers and administrators as well as a racist curriculum. According to two Black Cooley students, Cassandra Ford and Gregory Hicks, these experiences were common. As Hicks explained, “[. . .] we oftentimes had to run home to escape being attacked” in that community. “When we got out of school,” Cassandra Ford recalled,

we had to run to catch the bus because you had Donald Lobsinger and his group, a band of people that came together in a van that would grab the kids and beat them up. They’d get out of the thing with slings and belts and things scaring you half to death. So, we were all running to catch the bus. ⁶⁴

Hicks, Ford, and the other students had to walk through a hostile white neighborhood before they reached safety across Wyoming Street. These kinds of experiences with racial violence, fueled by shifts in the city’s racial and spatial geography, ignited demands for a student voice in school governance and desegregation policies.

Students found in the Black Power movement the analytical tools and organizing strategies that helped them to navigate theses demographic shifts and their consequences. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers’ political education classes constituted one of these critical sites of political engagement and training for Hicks and Ford. The League was an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and “community-based labor organization.” ⁶⁵ Formed in 1969, it built on the success of the wildcat strikes that the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and its affiliates or Revolutionary Union Movements organized to demand better working conditions in Detroit’s auto factories. The League’s radical Black labor activists distributed political literature to organize its base in the factories. But when calls to the police and threats to fire workers limited these organizing efforts, the organization turned to high school youth, as they could not get fired for distributing leaflets at five o’clock in the morning at the plant gates. In turn, these students used the League’s mimeograph machine to print its student paper the Black Student Voice, which was distributed in most of Detroit’s twenty-two high schools. Consequently, these students, through self-organization, formed a citywide high school organization known as the Black Student United Front (BSUF or “the Front”). As a citywide organization, the BSUF included members from many of the city’s public high schools. ⁶⁶

High school students developed a relationship with these workers because they saw their destinies bound up together. Gregory Hicks, founding member of the Front and a Cooley High student, explained his vision of the relationship between the League and high school activists, stating “It was the view that we were essentially going to become our parents and whatever they were encountering in the world of work, we would therefore encounter. We knew that the plants were oppressive.” He continues, “So, we wanted to change that overall dynamic. And in our more romantic sense, we wanted to take over control of those plants and run them in a more humane and equitable fashion.” ⁶⁷ Although Hicks characterized this as a romantic view, it was one grounded in the realities of a secondary education that tracked some Black students into vocational programs and created a school to factory pipeline. As the BSUF argued, in Detroit “what the average student gets out of 12 years of education” is “the assembly line.” ⁶⁸ Others joined BSUF chapters at various schools and worked with the League because they viewed these organizations as a vital resource.

Although the students found in these organizations the technical skills needed to organize for social change, they also gained access to analytical frameworks that shaped their use of these skills when the League, in conjunction with the Front, established political education classes for factory workers and students. According to Hicks, the League’s intergenerational study classes were essential to the development of leadership and historical knowledge in the BSUF. ⁶⁹ Members studied the history of chattel slavery, Black America, labor history, the rise of capitalism, “third world revolution,” and self-defense. Assigned readings included From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, Labor’s Untold Story: The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women, The State and Revolution, On Methods of Leadership, Negroes with Guns, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Wretched of the Earth, and Before the Mayflower to understand the history of African American movements and as possible theoretical lenses for in-plant and community organizing. ⁷⁰ Political education, in the hands of the League, constituted a social movement curriculum that challenged the mythologized progressive version of America’s racial history that guided the traditional high school curriculum. While ESVID’s conception of political education claimed to exclude ideology from its programming, the League’s political education classes used ideology as a critical resource to sharpen its members’ analysis of power.

Through its “pedagogy of liberation,” the League’s political education classes created an opportunity for Black adolescents to make sense of their experiences with desegregation and displacement alongside the concerns of Black auto factory workers who faced a shift in the urban political economy. According to Anthony Barnum, the League practiced “a pedagogy of liberation,” or what Lenin called an “education for revolutionary activity.” ⁷¹ Barnum explains,

The LRBW went through a process whereby they analyzed the historical moment in which they found themselves. This provided them not only with a greater understanding of the issues they were addressing, but also served as a pedagogical tool for members and potential members to become conscienticized. ⁷²

The classes, then, expanded the kinds of issues that students considered central to their lives and helped to inform how the young activists practiced “education for revolutionary activity.” Attending the League’s classes introduced students to their possible futures as factory workers while providing opportunities for them to develop their own analysis of those conditions and ways to improve them. Furthermore, it aided their ability to analyze the historical moment and institutions that shaped their coming-of-age experiences. The density of city space, where lines between schools and auto factories blurred, created rich contexts for a different kind of education beyond the classroom.

Some members of the BSUF wanted to institutionalize political education at Cooley High School and achieved a small measure of success in doing so. A week after the violence that rocked Cooley, school administrators, parents, students, and community leaders all met to discuss ways to improve the relationship between Black and white students. Soon after, fifteen-year-old Gregory Hicks along with fellow student Blain Nichols proposed to Principal Wayne Nester a school-sanctioned political education seminar. Political education, they stated, was key to “combating the narcotics flow on campus; removing the myth of the black-vs-white within Cooley; elevating students to the point that the school can be relevant.” Hicks and Nichols argued that political education, if done correctly, would “elevate the students to a point where they will welcome knowledge.” In these classes, students would review the curriculum and study the factors that led to student unrest. They included within this scope the functions of the Board of Education, commissioners in city planning, board of assessors, and housing commission. ⁷³ The students likely wanted to study the functions of government to either prepare their peers to step into the role of public service agents or to understand the rightful demands and claims that citizens could make of government agencies, regardless of their age. Their call for a political education seminar had the potential to introduce to civic education a structural analysis of power.

When the Cooley School-Community Council formed in October 1969, it immediately established a school-sanctioned political education seminar. One week later, the students invited Leonard Brown, a white Marxist and member of the League, as the first speaker for the seminar. According to Hicks, the title of Brown’s presentation was an “Introduction to Political Science Education: What Is Education? Student? Racism?” Brown had also planned to give his talk, “Capitalistic Society” a week later. Fred Linsell, member of the Detroit Commission on Community Relations, described in his report on Brown’s visit that his talk was “anti-white and anti-establishment, would be considered inflammatory by many, but was not untrue.” ⁷⁴ While historical evidence suggests that Brown’s visit was the first and last of this short-lived course, his invitation illustrates that students were not interested in learning how to become good workers, nor were they interested in the esoteric “life of the mind.” Instead, they argued that education should provide an understanding of power and ways to struggle against it.

Hicks’ decision to include the formal study of municipal government reveals that he marshaled his own experience with racial violence at Cooley and his understanding of how educational policies had tracked Black students into vocational education to expand the meaning of education for Black students. Furthermore, the League’s own focus on institutions and its class analysis sharpened the kinds of connections that the students were able to make. Students may have considered the relationship between the capitalistic society and the need to understand the role of city planners and the board of assessors in the character of the urban city, especially in a city that underwent significant transformations in its built environment and its political economy. While the rationale was not always articulated, their demands for a politically and culturally relevant education illuminate their vision of the role of education in urban transformations.

All of these educational projects began with the intellectual labor that students formed through nontraditional education which, rooted in the character of urban life, helped them craft and realize a vision of education that could transform the city. In the 1960s, Detroit was alive with radical activists, a growing Black political elite, researchers who viewed the city as a laboratory, and the auto workers who labored on the assembly line in the boisterous factories. For Black teenagers coming of age in the Motor City, this vibrancy of city life became a critical resource in their political learning and organizing. If ESVID relied on access to Black elected leaders and political institutions and used their knowledge of electoral politics to stake a claim in the city’s power structure, the young researchers of DGEI marshaled their relationships with local universities to gain access to the political institutions that created municipal policies. Students of the Cooley High BSUF sought an education that could provide an analysis of these very structures. The Cooley Political seminar did not want to simply understand the political process; instead, they also believed that a radical critique of the whole structure was needed.

From community-based education and research to student–worker alliances, Black youth developed wide-ranging strategies that helped them wade through the various structural mechanisms that functioned as barriers to liberatory education and Black self-determination. As researchers and activists, Black youth put into practice the AAPU’s conception of the “City as the Black Man’s Land.”